Environment Southland Information Management Conference

Regional councils and government agencies are increasingly under pressure to resolve data questions and discover how best to acquire, manage, collate, analyse, report and disseminate data, while managing  the associated costs. Steering organisations through these complex issues requires a solid understanding of what technologies are available and the information demands of the future *(source).

I had the great opportunity to speak at the Environment Southland Information Management Conference in Invercargill. It was a great event, well organised and very informative. I believe I could contribute my part to the line up and fill a few more gaps in the whole picture.
This was not a business as usual conference, it was obvious that the speakers took it serious to cater their presentations to the needs of the stakeholders. And with 70 attendees from regional and central government, as well as visitors from research and industry.

It was great to see the emerging patterns around NZ and similar approaches to a holistic, comprehensive and modern data strategy. If you are interested, this is a link to programme, and please see below for my slides. Watch the talk on Youtube.

A Spatial Data Infrastructure Approach for the Characterization of New Zealand's Groundwater Systems

I was very happy when I got informed that our latest research article was published in "Transactions in GIS". While being embedded in our New Zealand SMART Aquifer Characterisation programme, it was a great joint effort which results went beyond SMART.

Kmoch, A., Klug, H., Ritchie, A. B. H., Schmidt, J. and White, P. A. (2015), A Spatial Data Infrastructure Approach for the Characterization of New Zealand's Groundwater Systems. Transactions in GIS. doi: 10.1111/tgis.12171

It explains technical and methodological approaches of web groundwater data infrastructure and uses NIWA's CLIDB and GNS's NGMP as examples and describes the long way from stakeholder interaction, workshops and meetings towards an NZ data standard for the National Environmental Monitoring Standards (NEMS) framework - the Environmental Observation Data Profile (EODP) as data access and transfer blueprint for NEMS.

Wiley Online Library "Transactions in GIS" Journal

Alexander Kmoch on ResearchGate.

The technical work with colleagues, collaborators and partners from New Zealand research institutes (CRIs) like GNS, NIWA, Landcare Research, New Zealand regional councils like Horizons and Waikato (WRC), Hawke's Bay (HBRC) and and Bay of Plenty (BOPRC) regional councils which culminated in a draft OGC profile and is being incorporated into national standards in New Zealand, GitHub EODP and are based on the work over the last two years including a great review paper on OGC standards for groundwater,  customising the 52°North SOS server to interchangeably encode WaterML2 time-series data along O&M2 through a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) programme, and then customising the SOS server database access to demonstrate it as an adaptor on legacy databases of national significance, in specific an "NGMP/GGW-SOS" and a "CLIDB-SOS" demo through a NZ eResearch programme.

Digital Earth Conference 2015, Canada

"Towards a One-World Vision for the Blue Planet" was the slogan for the 9th Symposium of the International Society for Digital Earth (ISDE) from 5th - 9th of October, 2015, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

At Digital Earth 2015 scientists, engineers, technologists, and environmental managers from around the world will meet to share concepts, research findings, technologies, and practical applications relating to the Digital Earth vision. *()

I presented an experimental approach towards integrating scientific legacy codes into the OGC web services framework, on the example of exposing USGS MODFLOW through a vanilla and open source WPS (without using proprietary tools like ESRI Arc Server and Arc Hydro Tools etc).

I was very honoured and greatly appreciated the "Best Student Poster" award. It seems I really had the right audience at ISDE.

Furthermore it was extremely informative, and in the session about "Discrete Global Grid Systems" I learned a lot about this new approach of unifying traditional raster/coverage data with an equal area per pixel advantage ... one of the great shortfalls of todays popular Web Mercator projections. In fact spinning this further it could be a  great new approach and how groundwater, geology, ocean modelling and atmospheric sciences, which would benefit from an equal volume grid, particularly when re-mashing resources from different environmental/scientific/governmental/industrial domains.

There is even an DGGS OGC Standards Working Group on the way.